The Miami Heat successfully silenced an enormous amount of critics by winning an NBA championship last season, and they don’t want any of us to forget about it. Because of their slow start that has followed incredibly high offseason expectations, the Los Angeles Lakers have drawn a number of comparisons to the 2010-2011 Heat. According to LeBron James and Dwyane Wade, the two situations are hardly alike.
“No one will ever be able to compare what we went through,” James told the Miami Herald on Friday. “Even though they’re not winning and they’re losing a lot of games, it’s still nowhere near what we went through. Yeah, right. That level of magnitude was nowhere near where ours was two years ago. Nothing. Nothing compares to it.”
Wade agreed wholeheartedly.
“Because of everything that happened in 2010 with offseason signings, it was, automatically, just a lot of negative things that was said about us,” Wade said. “(Los Angeles) didn’t go through that at the beginning. They didn’t go through anything negative about bringing those guys together, so ours started off bad and it stayed bad for a while, and then we got better.”
In a way, the Heat stars are right. LeBron was referred to as one of the greatest players of all time but had no championship hardware to show for it, so that pressure loomed over Miami. Kobe Bryant could use another ring to better his legacy, but he hardly needs it. The mystery of whether or not LeBron would be able to win his first ring created an enormous amount of pressure in itself.
However, the Heat players brought on much of the pressure that they faced last season and the year before. You didn’t see L.A. throwing any type of Three Kings introduction party when they acquired Steve Nash and Dwight Howard. It makes sense that the Heat want everyone to know they overcame more obstacles than any team in NBA history, but let us not forget that they brought much of it on themselves.
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